Any chance you're opening the file from an email attachment.

The email client (like Outlook or Outlook Express) uses the Temporary Internet
file location and that doesn't get looked at with windows|search.

If your file does come from an email attachment, I'd suggest that you either
save it to a nice location and then open it from there--or do a File|SaveAs as
soon as you open the file.

If you want to see the file location, you can open the email attachment and then
use:

=cell("Filename",a1)
in an empty cell.

You'll see a path to one of the several subfolders under the Temporary internet
files folder.

DIANE K wrote:

This is not the first time this has happened. I'm extremely paranoid, so I
save changes frequently when I'm updating my worksheets. I had another
instants on Tuesday when I made changes to a worksheet, saved as I was going
along, closed the workbook and when I reopened the workbook the changes were
not there. I ran a search to see if the file got saved in another directory
or by another name in error. When I searched on *.xls for 7/3/06 I got no
hits. I'm running Windows XP and have 2002 Excel, could that be the
problem.

--

Dave Peterson